Prologue – Gregory
I wasn’t supposed to feel anything.
That was my purpose.
Volkov was always loud after midnight—not celebratory exactly, but charged like the air before a storm that hadn’t decided yet whether it wanted to destroy something. Smoke hung in layers beneath the ceiling lights. Vodka moved around the table in a rotation so practiced it had become ritual. The bass from the speakers lived in your chest if you let it, a second heartbeat you hadn’t asked for.
I didn’t let it.
I sat back in my chair, glass in hand, and watched my brothers be loud without me.
That was my usual position in these things. Slightly removed. Present enough that no one questioned it, distant enough that I could see the whole room without being part of it. Old habit. The kind you stop noticing after enough years because it stops feeling like a choice and starts feeling like anatomy.
Across the table, Luka and Damir were destroying each other over a harbor worker who had apparently dropped a crate of product into Lake Michigan. The details kept shifting with each retelling, the crate getting heavier, the worker getting stupider, Luka’s voice climbing the kind of octave that meant he had already lost the argument and hadn’t figured it out yet.
“Three years,” Damir said flatly. “The man has moved our shipments for three years without a single problem—”
“Until the problem was at thebottom of the lake, Damir—”
“One mistake—”
“An expensive one.”
Yegor sat at the far end of the table and said absolutely nothing, which was his contribution to most conversations. He stared at a point somewhere past Luka’s shoulder with the expression of a man silently calculating how many more minutes he was required to be present before leaving became acceptable.
Luka turned to him anyway. “Well?”
“No.”
“I haven’t asked you anything yet.”
“You were about to.” Yegor picked up his glass. “The answer is still no.”
Stephen, sitting beside him with a glass of water because Stephen had never needed alcohol to be the most unsettling person in any room, set it down quietly and looked at Luka. “Let it go.”
“I’m not—”
“You are.” A pause. “Let it go.”
Luka let it go then immediately started a different argument about something else entirely, and the table shifted with him the way it always did, because that was just the weather in our world—loud, circular, and strangely comfortable if you’d lived in it long enough.
I watched all of it and felt a stillness that had become the closest thing I’d had to peace.
Not happiness. I wasn’t confused about what I was. But on nights like this, between assignments, between problems that needed dissolving—on these rare, borrowed nights—there was an absence of pressure that almost passed for rest.
I was not a man who got attached to rest.
But I’ll admit, I’d just decided it was a decent night.
Then my phone buzzed.
One vibration. I glanced down.
Matvey.
The stillness inside me sharpened into something else entirely.
The Pakhan didn’t text. That was simply not a thing that happened. Matvey Kamarov communicated through summoning, through silence, and looks that made men straighten their spines without understanding why. The fact that his name was on my screen, in writing, at midnight, meant something had shifted. Something quiet and significant and requiring no witnesses.